Patrick O'Brian - The Letter of Marque

'I shall send Pratt the necessary instructions to deal with the body and post down to Aubrey tomorrow. Then, since the Surprise is yet to be prepared and provided with the vast quantity of stores required for the South American voyage, I believe I shall go to Sweden and wait for him there. I shall take the packet from Leith.'

'You do not suppose that this death will change Aubrey's plans?'

'It would surprise me if he were much affected. The General was not a man to inspire any great liking or esteem.' 'No. But there is a not inconsiderable estate, I am told.' 'Little do I know of it, except that it is sadly encumbered; but even if it were half the county I do not believe it would keep Jack Aubrey from the sea. He has engaged for this voyage; and in any case it is said that the Americans have sent one or perhaps two frigates of our own class round the Horn.'

The Aubreys had been buried at Woolhampton for many generations, and the church was filled with people. Jack was surprised and touched to find that such numbers had come to honour the funeral, since for a great while now Woolcombe House had seen none of the solid, long-established families who had dined there so regularly in former times, when Jack's mother was alive. There were some missing faces, of course, but many, many fewer than Jack had expected; then again the congregation was made up not only of old friends and connexions of the Aubreys but also of tenants, villagers, and men and women from the outlying cottages, who seemed to have forgotten ill-treatment, rack-rent, and the oppressive enclosure of Woolhampton Common. Another thing that particularly moved him was the way women from the village, many of whom had been his mother's and even his grandmother's servants, had hurried up to Woolcombe to make the house fit to receive so many guests. It had been allowed to run down sadly, even before the long period when the General was flitting about in the north country, afraid of arrest; but now the drive was as trim as ever it had been, and the public rooms at least were scrubbed, swept and beeswaxed, while tables had been set out to feed those who had come from a distance. One table, with all its leaves spread, was in the dining-parlour, and another, to be presided over by Harry Charnock of Tarrant Gussage, Jack's nearest cousin, stood on trestles in the library.

The General's widow played no part in any of this. As soon as the hearse was known to have reached Shaftesbury she had taken to her bed and she had not moved from it since. Various reasons for her behaviour were put forward, but no one ever mentioned extreme grief: whatever the cause, Jack was heartily glad of the fact. She had been a dairymaid at Woolcombe, a fine snapping black-eyed girl, apt to come home late from fairs and dances and pretty well known to the local young men, including Jack. Although he felt a certain moral indignation when his father married her it had soon worn off; he did not think her a bad woman at all - for example he did not believe the present rumour that she was keeping her bed because the family silver was hidden under it - but he had not forgotten their nights in the hay-loft either, and this made their meetings awkward; and he had to admit that on those rare occasions when he came down, it could not but wound him to see her sitting where his mother had sat.

So Mrs Aubrey stayed in bed, and Sophie, being most reluctant to obtrude on her sorrow or to appear in the house as its present mistress so soon, had stayed in Hampshire; but the second Mrs Aubrey's son Philip had been brought back from school. He was too young - a very little boy - to have much piety, and at first he had not been sure whether this was meant to be a celebration or not; he soon caught Jack's tone however, and now, in his new black clothes, he walked about with his tall half-brother as they acknowledged their guests' kindness in coming and echoed his 'I thank you, sir, for the honour you do us.'

He spoke up well, with neither too much confidence nor too much timidity, and Jack was pleased with him. They had not met half a dozen times since Philip was breeched, but Jack felt a certain responsibility for him, and in case he should wish to make the Navy his career rather than the army he had had his name entered on the books of various ships for the last few years, while Heneage Dundas (soon to be home from North America) had provisionally agreed to take him to sea as soon as he was old enough. Jack thought it probable that the boy would do him credit.

But he had little time to reflect on Philip's future, because as he was trying to induce his guests to sit down he saw an elderly man, indeed an old man, thin and very tall in spite of his stoop, walk slowly into the dining-parlour and peer about the crowded room. This was one of the missing - the understandably missing - faces he had regretted in the church, Mr Norton, a very considerable landowner on the other side of the Stour. Although his connexion with the Aubreys was fairly remote, its existence and the close friendship between the families meant that Jack had been brought up calling him Cousin Edward. It was Cousin Edward who had nominated Jack's father for the pocket-borough of Milport, which lay on one of his estates and which the General had represented in parliament first as a Tory and then as an extreme Radical, according to what he considered his interest. Echoes of the furious quarrel that resulted from this change and indeed from the member's general course of conduct had reached Jack on the other side of the world, distressing him very much; on coming home he found that the echoes fell far short of the truth, and he had never supposed he should see Mr Norton at Woolcombe again.

'Cousin Edward,' he cried, hurrying forward. 'How very good of you to come.'

'I am so sorry to be late, Jack,' said Mr Norton, shaking his hand and looking into his face with grave concern, 'but my fool of a coachman overturned me the other side of Barton and it was a great while before I could get along.'

'I am afraid you were much shaken, sir,' said Jack. He called out 'Ladies, pray be seated without ceremony. Gentlemen, I beg you will sit down.' He led Mr Norton to a chair, poured him a glass of wine, and the meal began at last.

A long meal, and tedious, with all the awkwardness inherent in such occasions; but it did have an end in time, and upon the whole it went off very much better than Jack had feared. When he had seen the last of his guests into their carriages he returned to the small drawing-room, where he found Cousin Edward dozing in his wing-chair, one of the few old pieces of furniture that had escaped the modernization of Woolcombe House. He tiptoed out, and in the passage he came upon Philip, who asked 'Should I not say good-bye to Cousin Edward?'

'No. He will be staying the night: his coach was overset the other side of Barton and broke a wheel. Besides, he was much shaken. He is very old.'

'Older than my father - our father - was, I dare say, sir?'

'Oh, much older. He and my grandfather were contemporaries.'

'What are contemporaries?'

'People of the same age: but it usually means people you knew when you were young together - school friends and so on. At least that is what I mean. Cousin Edward and my grandfather were contemporaries, and they were great friends. They had a pack of hounds together when they were young fellows. They hunted the hare.'

'Have you many contemporaries, sir?'

'No. Not by land. There was almost no one here of my age whom I knew well apart from Harry Charnock. I went away to sea so early, hardly much older than you.'

'But you do feel at home here, sir, do you not?' asked the boy with a curious anxiety and even distress. 'You do feel that this is a place you cannot be turned out of?'

'Yes,' said Jack, not only to please him. 'And now I am going to look at the vine-house and the walled garden. I used to play fives, left hand against right, on the back of it when I was a boy. Yet now I come to reflect, since we are brothers, you should probably call me Jack, although I am so much older.'